Vegetarian Eating

" Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother would not recognize as food. That, more of less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy." -Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food-



"People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease...People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored." -T. Colin
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What's in a Name: The Many Types of Vegetarianism
Why did a doctors group sue the USDA over vegetarianism?

China Study Eating Advice

How have your views changed?

A.
I was raised on a dairy farm. I milked cows. I went away to graduate school at Cornell University, and I thought the good old American diet is the best there is. The more dairy, meat and eggs we consumed, the better. The early part of my career was focused on protein, protein, protein. It was supposed to solve the world’s ills. But when we started doing our research, we found that when we start consuming protein in excess of the amount we need, it elevates blood cholesterol and atherosclerosis and creates other problems.

The problem is that we study one nutrient out of context. That’s the way we did research — one vitamin at a time, one mineral, one fat. It was always in a reductionist, narrowly focused way. But I learned that protein is not quite what we thought it was. We’ve distorted our diet seriously through the ages, and we have all the problems we have because of that distortion.

What loomed large for me was that we shouldn’t be thinking in a linear way that A causes B. We should be thinking about how things work together. It’s a very complex biological system. The body is always trying to restore health every microsecond of our lives. How do we furnish the resources for the body to use? In order to try to understand that, we shouldn’t be giving ourselves individual nutrient supplements. We shouldn’t be trying to discover which gene causes what. But those two areas have become the major focus of research over the years.

Q.
So how should we be eating?

A.
I don’t use the word “vegan” or “vegetarian.” I don’t like those words. People who chose to eat that way chose to because of ideological reasons. I don’t want to denigrate their reasons for doing so, but I want people to talk about plant-based nutrition and to think about these ideas in a very empirical scientific sense, and not with an ideological bent to it.


Source:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/nutrition-advice-from-the-china-study/?src=me&ref=health

Doctors Clueless About Nutrition - NYTimes

Doctors (most) are clueless about diet and nutrition.
A doctor admits Med School didn't teach him to help patients eat better. Med school teaches doctors to diagnose disease and treat it with drugs, surgery, etc.

We are what we eat. Doctors treat the results of our diet.

The article says...

Research has increasingly pointed to a link between the nutritional status of Americans and the chronic diseases that plague them. Between the growing list of diet-related diseases and a burgeoning obesity epidemic, the most important public health measure for any of us to take may well be watching what we eat. See Diet and Disease at National Cancer Institute site.

Added Dr. Chauncey: You can’t just keep writing out script after script after script of new medications when diet is just as important as drugs or any other treatment a patient may be using.